Combat Medic: the Virtual Heroes 3D Training Game for Army Medics

Combat Medic is an educational program for Army medics and other military medical personnel. It targets what its developers name as the top causes of death on the modern battlefield: hemorrhage, airway obstruction and tension pneumothorax. It also covers equipment preparation, team organization and communication, through interfaces designed to preserve contextual, cognitive and task fidelity.

The game runs in a 3D collaborative virtual world that opens from any internet-connected computer, and it was built with Unreal Engine 3 on the GO Platform. Learners practice alone or join facilitator-led team events in multiplayer. Virtual pre-game and post-game meeting spaces and a debriefing platform with task-performance analysis and video playback support reflection.

Performance data from every user is recorded. In the developer's account, commanders and training noncommissioned officers can use it to track medic competency and direct training resources to where they matter most. In June 2014 a focus group test ran with 17 medics and 7 instructors.

Virtual Heroes was founded in 2004 to build learning for medical, military and corporate professionals. ARA acquired it in April 2009, and the division builds collaborative interactive learning for healthcare, federal and corporate training markets. Its 2014 ranking in the Triangle Business Journal's list of largest game developers in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area put it fifth, with 22 employees. Epic Games, maker of the Unreal Engine that Virtual Heroes used, and Red Storm Entertainment held places one and two, and expansion plans could have lifted the division to third or fourth by 2015. See the Virtual Heroes studio profile and the 2014 Showcase & Challenge results.

Virtual Heroes is still active at virtualheroes.com, where it describes itself as a division of ARA building high-performance simulations for high-stakes training. Its pages describe Combat Medic as the technology behind a medical trainer built for Wake AHEC, with customizable learning modules in a collaborative 3D world, where trainees practice assessing vital signs, treating injuries and performing triage. The page presenting it is a demo video post for that training program, and repeat the 2015 Gold Medal and the 2014 finalist placement. Its site sorts work into commercial, government and military, and medical and healthcare industries.

The home page now offers other free downloads, among them Mission Biotech, and does not list Combat Medic as a download. A public place to play Combat Medic is therefore not confirmed.